Pool opening delayed while work being done

By Jean Reid Norman

Saturday, May 2, 2009 | 7:29 a.m.

Come May 9, Linda Molisee’s two teenagers will be making six trips to Henderson a week.

Cori Molisee, 13, and Cody Molisee, 14, will have to head to the Henderson Multigenerational Center , 250 S. Green Valley Parkway, Henderson, for daily practice with the BCH Heatwave swim team while the Boulder City Municipal Pool , 861 Avenue B, Boulder City, is closed for almost two months of repairs.

“We will try to carpool,” their mother, Linda Molisee, said as the children did laps in the covered pool.

The only public pool in Boulder City usually closes for two weeks in May every year to take down the bubble that covers it in winter and do annual maintenance.

This year, the closure will last until June 29 while crews handle four needed upgrades, city aquatics coordinator Sheri O’Berto said. Those improvements are:

-- New drain covers in the diving and wading pool to meet updated federal standards. The main pool already has the drain covers installed, but the work on the diving and wading pools was put off until they were going to be drained for maintenance anyway, O’Berto said.

-- New coping stones around all three pools. The coping stones are the rounded tiles on the pools’ edges that have three slits in them for water to drain through. The stones were installed with the pool in the 1980s and are getting very rough in places, O’Berto said. The new stones will be granite, she said.

-- Repair and resealing of the surge trenches, which catch the water once it flows through the coping stones and delivers it to the filtering system. The repairs of the coping stones and surge trenches should save the city water that is now leaking through the aging system, O’Berto said.

-- New plaster to line the bottom and sides of the main pool, which has crack in some places and uneven spots in others, she said.

The city had $150,000 in federal grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that it was able to redirect to the pool projects, but the money has to be spent by Sept. 30 or the city loses it, O’Berto said. So the projects are being done now.

“It’s never a good time to close,” she said, “but we have to complete the work by September.”

Katie Gebhart, who has three children, two of them on the BCH Heatwave and one on the Boulder City High School swim team, said her family will take the closure in stride. She plans to carpool the 34-mile round trip to get her Heatwave members to practice daily as well.

“What else do you do?” she asked. “Hopefully it will be a good fix and get it up and running.”

Molisee said the repairs are sorely needed. When she swims in the pool, she sometimes runs into the sides and scrapes herself on the coping stones, she said.

“If you run into them doing the back stroke or anything, you do get hurt,” she said. “It will make a big difference in the look of the pool and people’s attitude toward the pool.”

Molisee expects the next two months to be hectic, but it will be worth it, she said.

“The kids will have a place to be proud of,” she said.

O’Berto said the racquetball and Wallyball courts attached to the pool complex will remain open during the construction from 1:30 to 8 p.m.

“They can still come in and cool off,” she said.